I'm Still Here

Here's a documentary I'd like to see: Joaquin Phoenix pouring hot tar on roofs for a few weeks. Or Joaquin Phoenix working as personal assistant to a star who is just as narcissistic as he is. If there was ever a human being who needed a visit from the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future, this is the guy.

We get to see the actor suffer in "I'm Still Here," a documentary filmed by Casey Affleck. And we get to see him make everyone he comes in contact with suffer as well. But both the audience and the subject learn amazingly little during the 108-minute running time, including whether this exercise was real or an act or something in between. In the end, it's irrelevant. If it's a hoax, there's an underlying contempt for the actor's colleagues and fans, who have helped put him in the economic position to get this piece of performance art made. And if it's real ...

How insufferable is Joaquin Phoenix in the film? This is a man who angrily demands that his personal assistant do a snow angel on the ground, and then ridicules him because it isn't good enough. When he snorts what appears to be cocaine off the breasts of a hooker he ordered on the Internet, it's one of the actor's more appealing and human moments. At least he stops whining and berating people for a few minutes.

"I'm Still Here" follows Phoenix's supposed retirement from acting, beginning in early 2008. He declares, "I don't want to play the character of Joaquin anymore," one of the few sentences where he uses his name in the third person just once. Phoenix gets in touch with P. Diddy in an attempt to jump-start his ridiculous rap career, blows off Ben Stiller and reacts with anger, embarrassment and vomit in the aftermath of a high-profile meltdown on the "Late Show With David Letterman" - which ended with the late-night television host quipping, "Joaquin, I'm sorry you couldn't be here tonight."

Letterman's line is funnier and more direct than anything in "I'm Still Here." As a matter of fact, the visits from famous friends are the only time that this exercise comes to life. Edward James Olmos drops by and says something deeply profound. Then Phoenix goes through the rest of the movie misquoting him.

"I'm Still Here" is like watching the 15 minutes in "Boogie Nights" where Dirk Diggler tries to become a recording artist, stretched into a full-length movie. Is it a brave performance by Phoenix? Possibly. Is it interesting at times? Definitely. The most memorable parts involve his friends/assistants, who are entering middle age and have no identity beyond the actor, who treats them like complete crap. (This is what HBO's "Entourage" is going to look like if it makes it to Season 23.)

But Phoenix and Affleck, credited as "co-writers," don't provide enough of a backstory to put the actor's current state in context. There's an old video of the young Phoenix kids singing and dancing like a "Brady Bunch" variety hour act, and then we go straight to the adult post-"Gladiator" Joaquin, in all his surly, mumbling, homeless-looking glory.

Lines that might be funny in a Christopher Guest film ("I really want it to be a hip-hop 'Bohemian Rhapsody' type of thing") are delivered with no attempt at comic timing. Unsure whether to laugh at Phoenix or judge him, audience members are constantly forced to put their emotions on hold until later, waiting for a payoff that never arrives. What's left is discomfort, and anger at the thought that if this is false, then maybe the joke's on all of us.

The best time to see this movie may be 10 or 20

years from now as a midnight movie - hopefully on a double bill with an Andy Kaufman documentary. The Phoenix we see on screen is too self-centered to stay out of the spotlight. Eventually he'll provide some perspective when he explains this pretentious mess.

-- Advisory: Speaking of Dirk Diggler ... this film contains an entire Bay to Breakers worth of full-frontal nudity, profanity, drug use and bad musicianship.